Abstract or Table of Contents

abstract: it is claimed that not just the students of 1968, but also the hooligans from the late fifties ought to be regarded as social movements: they share an international mass character during a specific period, a high degree of self-created cultural identity organized outside the institutional framework and effectively oppose major features of society - contributing thereby, so it is argued, to the fragmentation of the bourgeois subject and the basic divisions upon which it is built: the division of body and mind, of female and male, and of classes. secondly it is demonstrated that both movements were borne basically by the same birth cohorts (approximately 1939-1948), who, due to the second world war, shared common generational experiences almost all over the world, one of which is a "control gap" during childhood in the immediate postwar years that gave them a relative freedom and importance for familial reproduction that children usually are deprived of. the later reconstruction of proper authority and control hit them as potentially arbitrary. these experiences were expressed by the hooligans through actions and music long before the students could express them by words and explicitely political resistance, thereby preparing the fusion of these class-specific ways that can be observed in youth nowadays. this is discussed in the light of social science literature contemporary to the movements which may be accused of a middle class blindness failing to recognize the historical specificity and political relevance (however overtly non-political) of lower class movements.;